- Gesso (jĕs’ō)
- noun. An undercoating medium used to prepare or ‘prime’ canvas or other surfaces before painting.
One of the changes in sp v6 is Gesso, a toy and an experiment in ways to separate (or not) base CSS. It is [intended to be] not much more than a glorified “reset” for common modern browsers.
Gesso consists largely of an older version of CSS Boilerplate by Nathan Borror (who was an original developer of the much more famous and, later, complicated Blueprint CSS framework). Newer Boilerplate revisions use some px-based sizing that doesn’t yet fit well into all of our projects (looking at you, corporate IE6 stragglers…), so it suits our purposes to keep this em-based set around and up-to-date. Included are some changes I find convenient, and I excised a few things that I don’t need. Gesso includes a print-media style sheet we put together at Utopian.net Labs. After much debate, it still includes Boilerplate’s [vh]form classes for base form styles. It is available under a BSD-like license, like Boilerplate before it.
Right now, the easiest way to get Gesso is to fetch the (<50KB) sp download, wherein the base styles can be found beneath css/gesso/. A distro page just for Gesso will appear, should there be any interest outside of Utopian.net.
In the sprit of “dog food” and all that, overnight I upgraded joshix.com to the razor edge of Habari svn. I’d been running on the stable 0.5.2 release here, but the urge to develop and test against my own little use case is too strong.
This also brings the most-current version of the sp theme to this site, instead of the randomly-hacked/patched/reconstituted custom version I had been using. Sp v0.5, compatible with the `stable’ Habari 0.5.2 release, will see no further updates of any kind.
The version you see here is, roughly, sp 0.6.4RC. However, since we’re tracking the moving target of the Habari repository tip, I’m dropping all the resolution from our version number for now. This release of sp is numbered 6, and that ‘version number’ will reflect only the targeted Habari release series.
Sp v6 is for use with tonight’s nightly, Habari svn rev 2971, and up. It’s available from our dev server, either at the link above, or via git clone git://labs.utopian.net/sp.
A new version of sp is packaged up for download. It includes a fix to make the theme login page show session messages (thanks to rick_c), updates the theme’s use of a few changed Habari functions, and includes some CSS work that we now use as a base in other projects.
If you’re interested in the complete change history, you should be able to
git clone git://labs.utopian.net/sp.git
to get your own copy of the source repository.
Enjoy!
Update of the sp theme for Habari versions ≥ svn revision 2907 (aka 0.6-alpha) is available over at the testing server. Version 0.6.2 of sp updates from $user to $loggedin to fix the login box, synchronizes some CSS class names with Simplish (for my convenience), shrinks the header background image down by 5 more bytes, and removes unnecessary conditionals in the sidebar code (thanks miklb for the advice).
I relented and added support for threaded comments to Simplish for the upcoming WordPress 2.7. I have some initial code and a demo up at labs.utopian.net. So now we load a JavaScript — but only when the threaded comments setting is true, and even then only on single post views.
I’m not sure about supporting in Simplish the eventual threaded comments in WordPress ≥ 2.7. The threads feature is fine enough, but so is a simple theme that doesn’t load any JavaScript.